Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
123 results found tagged blind users.
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V-Lynx: Bringing the World Wide Web to Sight Impaired Users
This 1996 paper from the University of Southern Mississippi presents V-Lynx, one of the earliest voice-enabled web browsers designed to make the World Wide Web accessible to sight-impaired users. At this time, WWW traffic had only recently become sig…
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Constructing Relational Diagrams in Audio: The Multiple Perspective Hierarchical Approach
This paper from Queen Mary, University of London presents a novel approach for constructing and manipulating relational diagrams — such as Entity-Relationship (ER) diagrams — through an audio-only interface. While previous research addressed non-visu…
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Blind Hero: Enabling Guitar Hero for the Visually Impaired
This paper from the University of Nevada, Reno presents Blind Hero, a modification of the popular video game Guitar Hero that replaces visual stimuli with haptic feedback to enable visually impaired players to participate. The system uses a custom ha…
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Automation of Repetitive Web Browsing Tasks with Voice-Enabled Macros
This paper proposes an approach for automating repetitive web browsing tasks through personalized macros with a speech-enabled interface, implemented within the HearSay non-visual web browser at Stony Brook University. The core problem is that non-vi…
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Enriching Web Information Scent for Blind Users
This paper investigates whether annotating web links with accessibility scores of their target pages can improve navigation efficiency for blind screen reader users. The core idea draws on information foraging theory: just as sighted users follow vis…
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NavTap: A Long Term Study with Excluded Blind Users
This paper presents a long-term evaluation of NavTap, a navigational text-entry method designed specifically for blind users who cannot effectively use standard mobile phone text input. Unlike traditional MultiTap — where users press a key multiple t…
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Assistive Web Browsing with Touch Interfaces
This demo paper from Stony Brook University proposes a touch-based directional navigation technique to improve web browsing for blind users on touch devices (iPhone, MacBook trackpad). The authors identify two key problems with Apple's VoiceOver touc…
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Does a Sonar System Make a Blind Maze Navigation Computer Game More "Fun"?
This student research paper from the Blind Programming Project at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville presents "The Dark Labyrinth," a zombie-killing maze navigation game designed entirely for blind players. The broader project goal is to creat…
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Thematic Organization of Web Content for Distraction-Free Text-to-Speech Narration
This paper addresses a fundamental problem in how blind users experience web content through screen readers: the serial, linear narration of complex web pages that contain multiple thematic elements — news stories, ads, navigation taxonomies, and opi…
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PassChords: Secure Multi-Touch Authentication for Blind People
This paper presents PassChords, a non-visual multi-touch authentication method for blind mobile device users that is resistant to both aural and visual eavesdropping. The research begins with interviews of 13 blind smartphone users (average age 51, r…